Can an ex-civil servant finally persuade women to buy erotica?
Sex will be strictly cerebral in a new top-shelf magazine for 'thinking women', reports Jerome Taylor
SUSANNAH IRELAND
Suraya Singh quit her job at an education quango to launch Filament, a quarterly erotica magazine developed specifically for women
Suraya Singh used to have a mundane job working for an education quango. Like millions of women the 30-year-old would often spend her lunch breaks perusing the women's magazine section at a nearby newsstand.
There she became increasingly despondent at the celebrity gossip, diet tips and fashion advice she was bombarded with. What she wanted was a classy erotica magazine that women like her would be happy to buy. Men's magazines regularly mixed aspirational and intelligent content with high-brow erotica, but women, she felt, were being left out. Which is why she decided to quit her job and set up a magazine herself.
"There are an awful lot of stereotypes about who women are and what turns them on, which I don't think are true," she says. "If you're not some walking stereotype of a woman – who really speaks to you?"
Next week she will launch Filament, a self-funded quarterly erotica magazine that is squarely aimed at turning women on. A glitzy launch party complete with male acrobats is planned for Monday and an initial print run of 5,000 copies has just rolled off the presses.
Marketed as "the thinking woman's crumpet", the first issue features a semi-naked man in a praying position on its cover. Inside, artistic photoshoots of scantily clad male models are juxtaposed next to erotic short stories and erudite articles on off-beat topics such as the merits of being a geek. And if you tire of the sex, there's always a recipe for spicy celeriac bake to keep you busy.
Finding an erotic format that women will buy en masse remains a holy grail. Many publishers have tried to create female-friendly pornography – most have failed. The only comparable magazine on British newsstands is Scarlet, which was founded in November 2004 and is often described as "Cosmopolitan with even more sex".
Ms Singh believes other attempts to create successful female erotica have failed to take into account what women want. "Male pin–up style material that was marketed at women was often created based on wrong assumptions, or was merely repackaged from the gay market," she says. "If you want to turn women on, you have to be 100 per cent about women."
To illustrate her point Ms Singh pulls out a selection of magazines that tried, to varying degrees of success, to conquer the female sexual psyche. Two of the most successful are Play Girl, which printed its last issue in January after 32 years, and For Women – a 1980s attempt by the creators of Penthouse to do for women what it did so successfully for men.
Both magazines feature the sort of oiled, muscled Chippendale–esque models that have typified much of female erotica in the past and ultimately attracted almost as many gay men as straight women.
To find out what sort of models would truly appeal to a female audience, Ms Singh – a New Zealander with an Indian father who has been living in Britain for six years – set up an online community to ask as many women as possible what they would like to see in an erotic magazine. "The answers were very interesting," she says. "Although people like all sorts of things, the consensus was not for muscle-bound men. What they wanted were toned men with oval-shaped, often quite feminine faces."
All the models in the first issue were people Ms Singh approached in the street. "I just asked them whether they'd be prepared to take their clothes of for a new magazine," she laughs.
The first issue has avoided full-frontal nudity, but the Full Monty is not something Filament's editor will rule out. "When we did the shoots for the first issue some of the models did go all the way, but we didn't feel those photos worked," she says. "There's no point being explicit just for the sake of it. We're working on the second issue now and I think it will probably show quite a lot more."
The key now will be whether the magazine's formula really works. Laura Godman, deputy editor of Scarlet, says the female erotica market is there for the taking. "Over the past few years it's become so much more acceptable for women to admit that they enjoy erotica, whether it's magazines or 'fem-porn'," she says. "It's still a work in progress but people's opinions are changing."
But Rowan Pelling, the former editor of Erotic Review, believes creating erotica for women is notoriously difficult. "To my mind, there isn't really a vast difference between what men and women want," she says. "Good erotica will always appeal to both sexes regardless. I think it's very difficult to market specifically female erotica, but good luck to them."
The business of gender-bending specific
* Giving the seedy back-alley sex shop a friendly makeover was a work of commercial genius for the founders of Ann Summers, who now dominate the female sex shop market.
* Who says moisturisers are just for women? The male moisturiser industry has grown to such an extent that British men are the most enthusiastic male groomers in Europe – no doubt thanks in part to out-and-proud metrosexuals like David Beckham.
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Comments
Bring it on
It's funny, but Mizzz Singh bears an amazing resemblance to how I would expect a plain-Jane sans orgasmic ability to look like. Maybe I'm missing something. I have this suspicion that this "just entered my neurotic 30s" Mizzz Singh has been sat in her London apartment watching a few too many pornographic DVDs with her out-of-shape lady friends. And as she is a 'gal' on civil servant pay living in London, one would have to suppose those porno DVDs were generally full of West Indian lotharios.
Someone once said that the only material things London produces these days are homosexuals and prostitutes. So, producing a rag-mag that sits somewhere between those two lifestyles might give Mizzz Singh the opportunity to pay her rent and buy those bottles of red wine she so badly needs.
Readers should note that for the past 35 years, 30-something wymyn like Singh have been popping up with regularity, all claiming that they know what women want. I don't know what women want, you don't know what women want, and neither do the women! Only Singh knows!
The only plus to come out of this non-story is the fact that an unnamed educational quango lost the presence of someone whose mental health is probably a little too disturbed for her to be allowed near children.
The gender-bendingly named Rowan Pelling, quoted above, is probably correct (as she often is). I would only differ with her in some of the details. One being the hugely cyclic nature of women's hormones prior to age 35 or 40, and another, the inconvenient fact that the female brain is "wired" differently, as recently proved by MRI scan images of male & females subjected to the same external stimuli. In the experiments, the female subjects typically attached about 30% to 40% more emotions (using emotional regions of the brain) than the male subjects to almost every thought.
By the way, does anyone have a recent photo of Ms. Pelling? If she looks as good as she (usually) sounds on these issues then she'll no doubt be a stunner. Grrrrhhhhh ... Get out your tape measure Ms. Rowan, as I'm a bit of a handful in the company of a pretty lady with a brain.
I don't see what the looks of anyone on the editorial staff have to do with the content of the magazine. Do you honestly think FHM, Nuts and Loaded are written by men anywhere near as comparatively attractive as the women featured in the magazines? Of course not. They're tubby, unpleasantly smelling mouthbreathers just like you, me and 90% of our gender. That doesn't stop them featuring uncharacteristically alluring eye candy in their publication, and regardless of what you think of Ms. Singh's looks it won't stop her featuring uncharacteristically alluring eye candy in hers.
If wanting to look at titillating pictures of attractive members of the gender of your choice is a sign of 'mental health' being 'a little too disturbed', then I would suggest that Britain's psychotherapists are missing a trick.
There is more than enough sex being flaunted everywhere we look.
Just devalues stability of the family life.
Thanks. A very relevant article in the link. But we have to note that the situation we have today is not unique. There have been ancient civilisations where the communities went crazy on liberation but each time they were destroyed by God. But this time we hit the end-stops!
Disclaimer: I know the editor of Filament!
I also included in my count, those magazines that had been brought into being to specifically target girls as young as 14 or even 12 years of age, with rank debauchery.
This is called Brain Washing; there is no other term to describe it. It is being done for a reason, and by persons and organizations you never even take into account when you bother to think outside the box.
Kindly read this article: http://www.rense.com/general86/kill2.ht
As for you "knowing the Editor of Filament." Clearly, someone working for the Independent also knows the Editor (or owner) otherwise this non-event would not have qualified as being worthy for print by a national newspaper.
Men buy a magazine with nude women and sexual themes it is porno.
Undermines family values (corporeal4now)? Families are made through sex, I imagine. Let's celebrate the beauty of it, the beautiful men, beautiful women, beautiful families who make it.
Punjabi? Quite sure she's from New Zealand.
I hope this journal helps us liberate our thinking enough to celebrate the wonder and loveliness in us all.
Good luck!
There is almost total sexual freedom in Britain, Europe, and America already. How much more freedom do you want us to envisage? People copulating out in the open in Oxford Street, with their confederates walking around with tins in their hands seeking donations from the jostling voyeurs?
New magazines for Women keep being launched in London and New York because everybody is sexually jaded. Mizz Singh is only peddling novelty. Whatever she tries, has been tried already. The Filament project will be bankrupt within 12 or 18 months.
Sexual obsession is a mental disease. The more people have sex, the more they think they want or need it. If sex was so decisive to reproduction then how does one rationally explain the well-below replacement birth rates amongst white (Caucasian) women, world wide? It would appear that as a race, they are completely failing at being women.
As for your views as to what makes a family, they are infantile in the extreme. Sooner or later you will grow up enough to realize that without my help.
writing off new ideas because they don't fit your view of the world? see: bullying, racism, Xenophobia...
maybe such an extreme negative reaction is due to a deep seated personal neurosis? hmmm?
maybe some people should loosen up and accept that they must find some things erotic, and are therefore into erotica themselve by some degree? hmmm?
enjoying erotica is not a crime, it doesn't make you a pervert; it shows that your higher brain functions still work and you can maintain and inside voice ie. can mentally seperate (and enjoy) sexuality from the act of sex.
See you at the Filament launch.
If you see bullying, racism, xenophobia everywhere you look, then you are probably a confused communist with a social sciences degree.
And how is this for back-to-front thinking: "enjoying erotica [...] doesn't make you a pervert; your higher brain functions still work and you can maintain and [sic] inside voice ie. [sic] can mentally seperate [sic] (and enjoy) sexuality from the act of sex."
Higher brain functions? Unless you are mentally ill, how can you completely divorce love & respect from the act of sex and then have the chutzpah to call that behaviour the result of one's "higher brain functioning?"
Sexuality as a "higher brain function" is a total myth. Sexuality (and voyeurism) is driven by your Reptilian Brain: that primitive part of the brain that links us to our early hominid beginnings. Being obsessed with sexuality and all that implies is nothing more than a clear indication of rank infantilism. I know, because as a young man I once suffered from this condition myself (as nearly all Brits, male & female have done) and was not cured until I travelled and witnessed a different and better way of existence. I was also helped by reading a book that taught me how to insulate myself from outside conditioning and the vast media/entertainment complex. I have twice the strength I had years ago because I now own my own mind; I am no longer plugged into the "matrix of folly" that passes for "Liberty" in Britain and much of the rest of the West today.
Tell you what; I'll see you outside the bankruptcy courts, in about 18 months, when Filament is finally folded.